original_Habits-of-Effective-Users

7 HABITS OF
HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL USERS

1
INTRODUCTION
Marketing is a unique field that spans the spectrum of
art and science. The most successful marketers employ
a mix of creativity and data to reach their goals. But
effective marketing can be an uphill climb even for the
most experienced marketers.
The truth is, there’s not just one secret to creating an
amazing marketing strategy. The best approaches
are multifaceted, and include exciting and engaging
campaigns, active social profiles, excellent customer
rapport, and smart advertising. That’s a lot to
accomplish by one person or even one small team.
Here at ShortStack, our customers understand the importance of using amazing marketing Campaigns to take their
brands to the next level, and this comprises a huge part of these brands’ marketing strategies. As such, many of
them are successful companies who excel in their ability to drive leads and sales. To help kickstart your success,
we turned to the data to find out what makes our top users’ brands succeed. We take a mixed-methods approach
to all of our research, so we looked at the numbers (Campaigns, engagement, leads collected, etc.) and the quality
of their Campaigns to identify some useful best practices to implement.

2
ABOUT THE STUDY
ShortStack (ShortStack.com) is a marketing campaign-
building tool used by small and enterprise-level businesses,
and by large agencies. Founded in 2011, ShortStack is a
software as a service (SaaS) platform, and also offers custom
design services. ShortStack was recently named an Inc.
500 company. ShortStack was one of the first companies
to see potential in Facebook as a place to host tabs (which
Facebook also refers to as “apps”), contests and landing
pages. Since 2011, ShortStack has expanded its features
and services to be a one-stop-shop for marketers and social
media managers who need a multipurpose social media hub.
With ShortStack’s Campaign Builder, contests and landing
pages — which are all known as “Campaigns” — can be
designed and then promoted from any social network, and
can also be embedded on existing websites.
The purpose of this study was to identify practices that help
us identify our most successful users. Success was measured
by Campaign engagement (views and entries). We evaluated
the top 1,000 most successful ShortStack Campaigns, and
from there, closely studied the top 100 users, meaning those
with the most views and entries per month.
KEY FINDINGS
Our top users’ Campaigns receive an average
of 3,200 ENTRIES PER MONTH and an
astounding 46,376 VIEWS PER MONTH.
What this information tells us is that these
users get great engagement on their
Campaigns, so their efforts are working.
Engagement equates to data; those entries
are leads that have come to their brand
directly, giving our top users the chance to
turn those leads into loyal customers. This is a
lot of valuable data these users are receiving
on a regular basis.

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BEST PRACTICE #1
THEY USE ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCES
“Use your resources” is a fitting adage in all walks of life, but for
marketers, this is especially useful advice since the internet is filled with
high-quality marketing content. Not every successful marketer has a
marketing degree, and even if you do, it’s such an ever-changing field
that it requires a lot of reading and studying to stay up-to-date.
Our data showed that a third of our top users were referred to
ShortStack from our blog, and often put the advice shared in our
resources into practice. Accessing helpful resources means taking
advantage of expertise from the people who have already figured
out some solutions to problems you may also experience.
This isn’t just a shameless plug for our blog (although we work hard
to make it useful and interesting!); it’s a reminder to scout out the
resources that your favorite brands are creating just for you.
Always look for a blog link on a brand’s homepage, and take up offers
to download free white papers, ebooks, and worksheets. These are
resources you can peruse at your leisure, but you’ll likely create a
goldmine of a marketing archive over time that you can reference
again and again.

4
BEST PRACTICE #2
THEY SPEND TIME BUILDING A USER BASE
Great customer relationships don’t happen overnight. They’re the result of careful
and consistent outreach and rapport. This requires planning and patience.
On average, our top brands spend about 18 months running Campaigns
consistently to engage with their audience, and the persistence pays off.
Start by identifying your “dream client.” Visualize who you want to be using your
service or your product, and create your Campaigns around that. Be active
participants in the communities where your dream clients are found (but don’t
use that insider knowledge to spam these users). Consider it field research, and
create actionable steps after scouting out your dream clients and learning about
their interests and habits. This also shows these potential clients that you do
understand them and their needs.
Our top brands spend about 18 months
running Campaigns consistently to
engage with their audience.

5
BEST PRACTICE #3
THEY RUN CAMPAIGNS FREQUENTLY
On average, our top users have 42 Campaigns published
simultaneously. This number even surprised us! When we looked
at what types of Campaigns they are running at once, we saw a
combination: “set-it-and-forget-it” Campaigns (like newsletter sign-up
forms or informative landing pages); limited-time contests and
giveaways; feeds for blogs; and social media hubs.
One reason these users have so many Campaigns is because
they are longtime users, which helps reiterate best practice
#2 — spending time, energy and effort investing in a platform
and a strategy can pay off. For instance, some of these users have
been using ShortStack for four years; ten Campaigns per year for
four years attributes to their prolific Campaign creation.
This diversified approach shows that top
users are thinking outside the box and are
willing to go the distance for gathering leads
and attracting new customers. Plus, the more
ideas you try, the more you’ll be able to see
what sticks with your ideal customers/users.

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BEST PRACTICE #4
THEY RUN OMNICHANNEL CAMPAIGNS
Through past studies, we’ve found that users who run omnichannel
Campaigns — meaning, posting a Campaign to more than one platform
simultaneously — receive 83 percent more views than do Campaigns
published just to Facebook1.
It’s easy to get comfortable running Campaigns for just one place (like
Facebook). But the engagement on omnichannel Campaigns is much
higher because you’re exposing your brand to more people. Although
there may be some crossover, each network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,
Pinterest and Instagram, for example) has a unique user base, so your
followers will likely be different on each platform.
In our sample group of the top 100 users, 25 percent didn’t publish to
Facebook at all. This doesn’t mean they don’t use Facebook at all; it just
means that they saw value in running a Campaign other than just as a
tab on their Page. They ran their Campaigns on other platforms, and also
embedded their Campaign to their existing websites.
Our top users published Campaigns to an average of two pages; this
is telling, since the same users also have an average of 42 Campaigns
published at any given time, and they’re finding value in publishing this
array of Campaigns in multiple places.
1 | “Beyond Facebook: Campaign Response on the Web” http://www.shortstack.com/beyond-facebook-campaign-response-on-the-web/
25%
OF OUR TOP
100 USERS
DIDN’T PUBLISH
TO FACEBOOK

7
OUR “PICK RANDOM ENTRY” TOOL
WAS USED AN AVERAGE OF 25 TIMES
BEST PRACTICE #5
THEY GIVE USERS GOOD INCENTIVES
Many of the Campaigns our top users created involved the selection of a winner;
in fact, our “Pick Random Entry” tool was used an average of 25 times by each
top user per account lifetime. This meant that they were running contests or
sweepstakes as part of their engagement strategy and selecting a winner.
A contest with a prize incentive is excellent for engagement, and this doesn’t
require having to giveaway something big or expensive. The prize should
be relevant to your user base, and relevant to your product. For instance, a
photographer can offer some free prints or a discount on a photo session,
therefore attracting potential new customers or bringing existing users back to
their service. Our top users stick with prizes within their industry to ensure that
the leads they collect are legitimate and worth pursuing.

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BEST PRACTICE #6
THEY INVEST IN PREMIUM FEATURES
The majority of our top users are subscribers to our
Full Stack plan, which is our mid-level subscription that
offers many premium features, such as white labeling
and embedding. It’s tempting to stick to the free plans
that many services offer, but investing in a subscription
means that there is value in it for you.
Consider how your Campaigns are coming across to
your “dream clients” (from Best Practice #2). The more
you’re able to customize your Campaign and tailor it to
your brand, the more excited people will be to interact
with it. Premium features also give you freedom to
get creative with how and where you publish your
Campaign. For instance, 41 percent of our top users
embed their Campaigns to their website. By embedding, they are
able to drive more traffic and engagement to their existing website,
and the Campaign is completely white labeled, so it blends seamlessly
into their existing branding.

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BEST PRACTICE #7
THEY ASK FOR HELP
To round out our best practices, this final tip goes hand in hand with our
#1 best practice, “use available resources”: ask for help! No one is a perfect
marketer, or ShortStack user, from the get-go. By asking our team questions about
the platform, our most successful users are able to unlock all of the features and
get the most from the platform.
Our top users submitted an average of three tickets to our help desk per account
lifetime. The questions weren’t always technical in nature, either. Top users tend to
come to us for advice on what they should do next, or they send their Campaigns
to us to review and ask us if there are missing elements or other changes we’d
suggest. This allows us to directly aid in the success of the Campaign, as we
can make suggestions to use some features in our platform that they may have
missed. And it gives us the chance to see what our users are making and to think
of ways we we can help them reach their goals.
Our top users submitted an average
of three tickets to our help desk per
account lifetime.

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It takes a team to make a company succeed, and we don’t believe that great marketing tips need to be kept secret.
Ultimately, the main lesson here is that it takes time and creativity to succeed. Try multiple approaches to connecting with
your dream clients, and think outside of your normal go-to platforms for publishing and sharing.
Employing these best practices is a good start. They aren’t one-size-fits-all, but the data from our top users shows that these
suggestions can be applied to a wide range of industries and brands. Over time, these tips might lead to some new specific
practices you can implement with your team. As you see more success, they’ll likely become second nature, too.
BUILD MARKETING CAMPAIGNS,
PROMOTIONS AND LANDING PAGES FOR FREE
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FINAL THOUGHTS

original_Habits-of-Effective-Users

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